October 8th, 2008 08:59pm
tianodesign
Some time ago I discussed the idea of karma with friends. My take is that we create opportunities to work out our karma from the time we take our first breath. When we miss one opportunity, the next is more intense, as we try to move ourselves along our path.
Coming up with this blog entry, I was reminded of my take on karma. See, initially, I remarked online via Twitter that my thinking was to write about the kinds of clients who make book design and layout projects difficult to work through. An online friend, Liz Tufte, pulled me by the ear, like a Zen master it seems to me, with the following:
Frame it pos: educate ’em instead of complaining. Show from their POV. It’s about them, not you. [my emphasis]
I get it.
Finally.
Let me explain.
Early in my career, laying out my first book with heavy math, I worked with a very nice woman who had stepped in as project manager when my client—her employer—a book packager, lost their real project manager. She lacked any math typesetting or editing experience. The project moved pretty well early on. After the initial layout was done and all the equations formatted and in place via a Quark XTension called Mathable the novice project manager called me to say that I needed to decrease the size of all superscripts—and there were hundreds if not thousands throughout the book. I was scarcely done with those when the project manager got back to me with another boatload of changes and corrections. So I had to go through the book, page by page, a second time.
Kind of a newbie at the time, without vast experience, I wanted to get some credits on my resumé. So I was guided by the notion that the client is always right. And then afterward I complained to anyone who would listen how inefficiently the client had me work: two separate sweeps for corrections.
Five or six years later, I worked on a book for a production house that provided so much direction I nearly lost my mind. First, the book’s designer constantly tweaked the design—throughout the whole layout process. Additionally, I got corrections and changes from two different sources: my client, the production house, and my client’s client, the author. But the corrections and changes, mostly the latter, seemed to go on forever.
This time, I tried to explain, nicely, that two separate streams of corrections coming in daily—sometimes one set of changes just hours after the other—was grossly inefficient and costing the production house money. Indeed, I billed fully twice as much for these changes and corrections than I had for the initial layout of the book.
A difficult way to work, to be sure, but this time I figured that since I was getting paid for every minute, I had no complaint.
Recently, I had a similar experience as the last one. Different people sending corrections and changes all day long. For weeks. Sometimes there were mix-ups in which files were the latest—even though I dated them. Once again, I explained that the inefficient way we were working—and I believe the client mixed up files on the receiving end as much or more as I did on mine—was creating difficulties.
Okay—uncle! What every client now gets told at the start of each project is that they should wait until I finish the initial layout of the whole book before they start sending corrections and changes. They should all be gathered into one list for each chapter, no matter how many people are checking the chapters. They will then enable me to do my best work, more efficiently, and in the most economical way.
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October 2nd, 2008 07:57pm
tianodesign
Well, yes, technically … if you use PowerPoint to create your cover; and if you use Amazon’s “CreateSpace on Demand Publishing” service with its templates and automated features.
On the other hand, there is no editor looking over your book. Nor is there any professional designer using his or her skills and knowledge of typography and marketing to create a unique cover to attract readers and an interior that allows those readers to read your opus in a way that is relaxing and easy on their eyes.
Of course, for a fee, you can have all these missing touches applied.
As a book designer, page compositor, and layout artist, I am naturally aghast that authors who seriously place any value on their work would follow this route to publication. Admittedly, I have a horse in this race, since I professionally design and lay out books.
That all said, I want to be clear that I love books. I am not in favor of people with books that are of limited commercial appeal being denied publication simply because that commercial appeal is limited, without any regard to the quality of the book. But I also find it anathema to suggest everyone, including authors of books that have nothing to say and that say it badly should also be published. That is what such services as CreateSpace allow.
No wonder we keep hearing that the future of the book is dismal. If too many people who can afford to indulge their vanity in this way were to do so, I suppose that future—selfishly, my future—would be dismal. But I don’t guess those were people who would have been looking for my services in any event. And I probably don’t want to work on poorly written books about less-than-compelling subjects. And having worked on a number of self-published books, I have honestly experienced ones that are well-written and about interesting subjects.
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September 25th, 2008 08:34pm
tianodesign
Never underestimate the value of human interaction, whether it is in person or online.
No matter how well you think you know something—in my case, the software I use in the design and typesetting of books—there almost always comes a time when something occurs that makes you scratch your head and brings your work to a halt.
The latest example of this happened when I finished the first chapter of a book I am currently working on. The design phase went well. The client had some specific ideas for the cover, which were all fairly easy to implement. I successfully turned their ideas and my own in a fully-realized cover. The back-and-forth was kept to a minimum and the cover came out the way we wanted with relative ease.
The interior design came together just as easily. I built the chapter opening around an initial drop cap effect that virtually jumped off the front cover and inside. The number of design elements I needed to provide for was also minimal and handled almost effortlessly. That done, the actual page makeup has been going well. Right now I am laying out the backmatter.
But one thing was a sticking point. Sticking point? Hell, it drove me crazy. Uncharacteristically, I began layout with the frontmatter—half-title, title page, copyright/credits page, dedication, contents, and introduction. I prepped a PDF of the frontmatter to send to the client, a university press, for their viewing pleasure. That is when something peculiar happened.
I found that, despite the ability to start a layout in InDesign on a left-hand (verso) page, Exporting to PDF from within InDesign resulted in a document that opened on a right-hand (recto) page. Nothing I could find allowed the kind of chapter opening required: a full-page illustration on the verso and the beginning text on the recto.
Tired and needing to continue the layout, I posted on a number of forums and maillists, among them Yahoo’s Adobe InDesign Group. Response was slow, but as I was quite busy working, it did not matter. One of the first to reply was Roy McCoy, who had been thinking that a sister group to Adobe InDesign—this one for the posting of files people need help with—might be a good idea. He set it up and I was the first person to join and post anything. I uploaded a chapter I had finished in InDesign, as well as the PDF of that chapter.
In retrospect, the answer is simple enough. But, as I told Roy after he doped out the solution and let me know what I needed to do to get the PDFs to display correctly, there doesn’t seem any easy way to locate the information. I had searched InDesign and Acrobat Help from within those programs; I had also Googled the subject.
Here’s what Roy wrote:
I seem to have found the solution to your problem, and I can hardly believe it’s that easy. When I open your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.1.2, Capt. Taylor is displayed properly on the left if View > Page Display > Show Cover Page During Two-Up is unchecked. I’m not totally certain, but this suggests to me that either you have Show Cover Page During Two-Up checked, or you have a different or earlier version of Acrobat …
As it happens, I’m using version 7 of Acrobat Pro, but opening the latest version of Acrobat Reader, I was able to make the adjustment via the View menu just as Roy indicated.
Problem solved.
There is always someone who knows a little more than you do or has experienced issues before you do. There is also always someone who is less experienced and can use your help. Remember to give something back.
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September 9th, 2008 10:53pm
tianodesign
Certainly writing is a lone operation—except perhaps for those who write in packs or as partners. Book design, however, almost always lends itself to soloing. Of course, this may only feel correct to me because I have worked freelance out of my own studio at home for so long that I cannot possibly imagine teaming up with anyone.
At the same time, I really think it makes the most sense to work on design ideas alone, keeping my own counsel until I either get stuck or have completed something to send off to a client. Then I am occasionally comfortable enough to show what I am working on, as I wait for the publisher, book packager, or self-publishing author who hired me to respond.
But who do I show the work and talk to about it?
That’s where my virtual water cooler comes in handy. Now, I say “my virtual water cooler” because there are so many possibilities online—forums, maillists, Yahoo Groups, and social networking tools—that it seems unlikely a single freelancer could partake in very many … and still accomplish anything.
My lineup begins with a number of Yahoo Groups—some devoted to specific software packages I use, others covering the publishing and freelance publishing work—as well as maillists devoted to these subjects.
What I particularly like about these Groups and maillists is how they make it possible to reach out to people that I know from the very jump have more than mere passing familiarity with the issues I raise and the questions I pose. Almost always, responses come quickly and, generally, on point. There are also some replies from people who don’t value their own work—books, usually—enough to want to pay, fair, professional rates for freelance work.
But that last is quibbling.
My point is that, for advice and venting about issues or problems that may arise during the course of a project, there is no shortage of outlets. Beyond that, for human contact, when I’m just so squirrelly from staring at the pages I am making and I can’t get away from the studio, the social networking sites come in handy.
I use LinkedIn to line up contacts that will possibly—if thinks work out as I hope—lead to more work.
But Twitter is what I use for momentary exchanges, just to take a break, the way I would with a walk to a real water cooler. Mostly I “tweet” about my work and try to connect with people who are involved in publishing. So my little messages often refer to my work, allowing me to stay focused and then move back to the book I’m working on.
On Twitter, I can be found as stephenTiano.
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September 2nd, 2008 07:54pm
tianodesign
- What is a book designer/layout artist to do when something in a book “jumps out” as incorrect?
- Does it matter to the “big” publishers—as opposed to small publishers and self-publishers—if their freelancers make books using open-source tools?
- Have the people who promise payment—usually a “piece” of the profit from the wildly successful future book sales they foresee, considered what it would be like to have readers pay for their book after reading it if they liked the book?
- How many books per year at $2.50 to $3.00 per page does it take for a freelance book layout artist to earn a full-time living?
- What is the first method, with the best results, that new book designs and layout artists should implement to find clients and score new, paying projects?
- Do publishers and book packagers really mean to not value the design work they get when they pay a flat rate for page layout and treat the design as a free “throw in”?
- What about free fonts: Is the quality there for professional design? (Note: I have come out on the side that very fine free fonts are available to use in designing and making books. See Free Tools for the Beginning Book Designer.
- Aren’t contests and spec work ways for freelancers with no track record to get noticed by prospective clients?
- Do the advocates of Microsoft Word as a tool for book layout really not see that such books show very distinctly that they were not typeset professionally?
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August 24th, 2008 11:25pm
tianodesign
It’s taken me awhile to write and post this. Mostly because my granddaughters—“our replacements,” an old friend calls them—were visiting the last week and a half. But that may also have pointed me toward my material this time around.
See, I’ve been thinking about novice book designers starting out. It can be an expensive proposition when one begins, I realize, all while striving to get one’s foot in the door. Hardware is just the initial investment.
Software, too, adds up. Additionally, with software, there’s the stinking suspicion that open-source software—TeX (in all its flavors) and Scribus for pages layout, plus various printing, drawing, and photo editing programs—may make an investment in QuarkXPress or InDesign, and art programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator a waste of money.
I know there are those who swear by open-source, regarding commercial software as unnecessary. I am certain these same people do relatively good work. But no book publisher or packager who was looking to hire someone for design or layout of a book ever asked me whether I was skilled in TeX or Scribus.
But I come not to praise—or take shots—at software choices. Rather I want to discuss the tool next in line: typefaces. Where do we get them? What’s the story with how expensive they can be? Are there alternatives to paying top dollar to Adobe and the other foundries out there, boutique and otherwise?
The first types we handle are the resident fonts in our computers. On the Macintosh, my choice, that means Times Roman, Helvetica, Palatino, etc. On PCs I imagine that means fonts called Arial, Swiss, and Comic Sans—there’s an “inside sports” joke here that I’ll get back to … if I remember—among others. Then there are the “bonus” fonts packages with other software. I know of two reputable sources like that: Corel (Draw, Paint, WordPerfect)—which I have never owned, because Quark, Adobe products, and MS Word seemed to be pretty much the professional software of choice that a book designer/layout artist would need to consider—and Adobe.
My first font purchase, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, was a twosome: Adobe Garamond and Futura. I wish I could remember what they cost back in 1989. I think I recall around $100 each. Next I bought Bodoni and Frutiger from Adobe. And those were my last individual purchases for some time to come, because it wasn’t long after that I bought a version of Adobe Illustrator—version 6, I believe—that came with the aforementioned generous slice of Adobe’s Postscript 1 Typeface Library.
Many of my favorites, typefaces that I still use today, are in that Adobe collection. So I would urge any new book designer to look around for it, as there are more than mere favorites in it. Classic typefaces can be found in that collection. But that still requires an investment of cash.
What about totally free typefaces?
Well, I should digress here and say that there are many great resources to learn about typefaces. My favorites are John Boardley’s wonderful blog, I love typography and the forum Typophile. Truth be told, there are many others that I frequent now and again. Smashing Magazine, although primarily a web resource has good material about fonts. And there are countless others. For this piece I searched through all of them and more. I also put out the word for suggestions on a number of forums, though not on Typophile, as I thought it a bit much to ask professional type designers who earn their living creating types to suggest free typefaces.
One thing that becomes immediately apparent when doing a search such as this is that most free fonts are display fonts, not particularly good, and rarely complete. (By “complete,” I mean a complete set of characters, from upper and lowercase, to numerals, punctuation, and accented glyphs.)
But I did come up with eight typeface families that I think might be used in designing and laying out books. Now, to be fair, two of them, Fontin and Fontin Sans, I had learned about some time ago on the aforementioned I love typography. The fact that Jos Buivenga designed both a serif and a sans serif, making Fontin a comprehensively complete family caught my attention and I’ve been meaning to use them and plan to soon. I would advise novice book designers who choose to make such a search as mine to take a look at Mr. Buivenga’s exljbris Font Foundry, as well as his fine blog of the same name. He has a selection of eight fonts on the site, as well as an intriguing new one, Calluna, in the works.
My other six selections to start a type library for free are nearly evenly split between serif and sans serif types. They include another from exljbris, the sans Delicious. Next up is SIL International’s Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic. (Designed by Victor Gaultney, “Gentium” means “of the nations.”). Goudy Sans is an idiosyncratic sans by Frederic W. Goudy, available from The FontSite. The Fell Types, a selection of different serif, “modern revival fonts” I loosely categorize as a single selection. They bear some careful study in deciding whether and where to use them. Developed for computer typesetting by Igino Marini, they are available at The Fell Types. Last are Liberation Sans and Liberation Serif, again pleasing to me not just for themselves but because they form a complete serif and sans family. Developed by Steve Matteson, these are available at, among other places, dafont.com.
I think these form a nice set of types to study and use athe best of all prices. Which is not to say that there are not others out there that deserve to be mentioned. In fact, I invite anyone who has a favorite free typeface family that is suitable for book design, to please make mention of them in a comment to this piece.
Postscript: Remember to read the EULA—the end user licensing agreement—to see what the type designer’s stance on commercial usage is. At the very least, find out exactly how you should credit the designer, whether on the copyright page along with the book designer or in a Colophon at the end of the book. Make sure that you use wording that satisfies the designer. It’s the least that can be done for someone who, effectively, gives you his or her work for free.
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August 10th, 2008 12:58pm
tianodesign
Speaking of Charles Dickens’ novels, I used to say that I “scrupulously avoid.” My bad. I mean, I majored in English in college. I think maybe the Greek classics—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle … —filled me up, way back in my freshman days.
When I read about “The 9 Greatest and Most Important Books I Have No Intention of Ever Reading,” at the blog Bookgasm, I cringed. Even with the blogger’s explanations.
I cringed because I have never even picked up War and Peace (preferring Woody Allen’s Love and Death, although I swear I wasn’t a big Classic Comic Books buff as a kid, preferring superheroes). I’ve never picked up Love in the Time of Cholera or Lord of the Rings, either. Of the rest, Moby-Dick could be the greatest American novel—not a thought that originates with me. And I have read the novella Heart of Darkness twice and seen Apocalypse Now at least three times.
But now I feel compelled to get hold of each of the books on the list and read them all one after the other. Then again, I first said I intended to re-read all of Shakespeare about twenty years ago.
Then, too, as a kid I got considerable amusement out of using four-letter words in serious conversation around adults. Without flinching. Perhaps I’ve grown, or maybe I’m just growing old, but when otherwise thoughtful statements, oral or in writing, are peppered with that sort of language, and not to express great emotion, I can’t help thinking, “Oy, how distracting!”
But the crux of this piece is the words that keep ringing in my ears, my own words, about what a mistake it is to accept work paid on the cheap. I won’t go through it again, except to say why I sometimes contradict myself: sure, bills have to be paid, but that usually isn’t enough to justify. No, there are occasions when a book is compelling enough that I just want to give it “the treatment,” take part in bringing it to the world and help make it successful.
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August 4th, 2008 10:04pm
tianodesign
I tell myself I’ve arrived.
That means I am quite comfortable telling prospective clients I won’t be working for them if their proposed rate is as high as they’ll go. But it also means I’ll take a book that I like the looks of—what it’s about; how it says it—if I want to, whether it pays what I deserve or not.
And if I think a book needs to be out there and look the way my care makes a book look, I take that one, too.
Yeah, I do believe I’ve arrived.
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July 30th, 2008 09:55pm
tianodesign
- Get manuscript—final, if possible.
- Go through Table of Contents, checking length of lines of Chapter Titles for chapter openings.
- Read Introduction to get the “flavor” of the book.
- Do a stream-of-consciousness thing, jotting down the names of six or eight pairs of serif/sans serif typeface combinations that something about the Introduction and chapter titles suggest.
- Go through the manuscript page-by-page, making a note of each and every element requiring a stylesheet.
- Play with different page sizes—if that choice hasn’t been made for me already—and different page proportions. (Whenever in a funk, consult Bringhurst.)
- Select a serif type for body text; then pick a sans for display type—start by using pairs from item 4.
- Start creating some sample pages and let the hierarchy of some items—subheads, for instance—suggest themselves.
- Be sure to include “specialty” items such as numbered lists and pull-quotes (if called for).
- Send first sample pages to the client for initial feedback.
That’s how I begin to design a book interior, although I don’t actually work from such a checklist. I simply collected what I do into a list for this exercise. And it nicely ran ten items.
What routine does anyone else start their book designing with? Comments please.
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July 27th, 2008 10:24pm
tianodesign
I started the weekend by writing a blog entry about business cards. Specifically, about a business card I designed and might have printed for my use. Generally, I wondered whether business cards were too 20th century for a digital man like myself. I ended the entry with a poll—asking whether business cards were over or not, and if not, whether the one I displayed worked. Oh, yes, I asked about how it fit with what I felt was an influence by Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie.
When I posted it yesterday there were immediate problems. Three of them:
- a password was asked for;
- the poll wouldn’t display, only the code; and
- the business card wasn’t visible
At first I looked to see whether there was a simple solution. When nothing was immediately apparent, I posted and asked around online. Not a techie, someone pointed out a simple solution for the card’s disappearance and it reappeared. Then the poll disappeared.
My life has reached a stage where I lack patience for what I don’t know when I am on limited time and there are other options to replace the thing I didn’t know. So I took down the blog entry.
And now there’s this, my paen celebrating surrender when “technical difficulties” make one’s original plans impossible.
But I may still have the business card printed.
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